[glug-t] What's wrong with the GFDL

The following should be make things about the controversy over the GFDL. Got it 
from http://www.compsoc.com/~coriordan/faq.html#gfdl

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Is the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) v1.2 a good license?
No. All other FSF licenses are excellent, but this one has problems. There are 
a few small problems that little people like to make big deal about, but the 
big problem is "Invariant Sections".

The GFDL allows an author to mark certain off-topic sections as being 
"Invariant". These sections cannot be altered or omitted from altered versions 
of the book. FSF added this clause so that people publishing FSF books could be 
required to include a section about "Free Software needs Free Documentation" in 
printed or digital copies.

That's a good idea. But what about people that add Invariant sections such as 
"Why the US were right to bomb Iraq". I don't like people being required to 
distribute that. Or what if IBM decided to improve the content of a book I was 
working on, but they also added an section titled "IBM is a great company 
because...". If I wanted to add their technical improvements to my copy, I'd 
also have to add their Invariant Section which I dissagree with, and I'd have 
to require that others don't alter it.

Because of the Invariant Sections clause, the GFDL is open to abuse. But even 
with these problems, I still use the GFDL for my book "Learning GNU C". This is 
because there are no documentation licenses that don't have problems, and I 
trust FSF to fix this license, hopefully in the near future. If I had to use a 
different license for my documentation, I'd use the GNU GPL.

For more discussion, see the *draft* Debian Postition Statement.


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